HP announced it will acquire 3Com which means it will acquire Tippingpoint. This will give HP a top notch Network Intrusion Prevention system. HP seems to want to be a security vendor with it’s earlier acquisition of the WebInspect products but has not had a lot of success marketing their security solutions so it is unclear how they will handle Tippingpoint. When thinking of security how many think of HP?

It also seems that HP’s primary goal in acquiring 3Com is not the IPS but the networking equipment that 3Com is known for. Tippingpoint was treated very much like a seperate company and it is not clear if this will continue. This is somewhat similar to the IBM acquistion of ISS. IBM’s primary reason for the acquistion was to get the managed services business and HP’s primary goal is likely to get the networking business not the IPS business. If handled well this could pose a serious competition to Cisco’s products and their dominance.